Re: [ba-ohs-talk] Re: A modest proposal

[Murray Altheim <m.altheim@open.ac.uk>]

Peter Jones wrote:    (01)

> Yes, you would.
> But then presumably if you were Swahili and wanted to look up giraffes
> you would
> be searching in Swahili and not in English.
> Swahili would be a scope.    (02)


Yes, exactly.    (03)


> Then it makes no difference to what the user would see, it only enables
> deep contexts within the system if that is desirable.    (04)


But this is how topic maps work. Your use of "deep contexts" I
don't quite understand.    (05)

Now, for reasons I'll not elaborate, let's try an example of this
with "elephant" in Zulu instead of a "giraffe" in Swahili (okay,
I could locate a speaker of Zulu but not Swahili on short notice,
and "giraffe" isn't translated into Japanese or Korean AFAIK). The
topic element looks like this:    (06)

   <topic id="ele34">
     <subjectIdentity>
       <subjectIndicatorRef
         xlink:href="http://www.altheim.com/zoo/elephant.html"/>
     </subjectIdentity>
     <baseName><!-- Zulu -->
       <scope><topicRef xlink:href="../language.xtm#zu"/></scope>
       <baseNameString>ndofu</baseNameString>
     </baseName>
     <baseName><!-- Korean -->
       <scope><topicRef xlink:href="../language.xtm#ko"/></scope>
       <baseNameString>코끼리</baseNameString>
     </baseName>
     <baseName><!-- Japanese -->
       <scope><topicRef xlink:href="../language.xtm#ja"/></scope>
       <baseNameString>象</baseNameString>
     </baseName>
     <baseName><!-- English -->
       <scope><topicRef xlink:href="../language.xtm#en"/></scope>
       <baseNameString>elephant</baseNameString>
     </baseName>
     ...
   </topic>    (07)

I've included "elephant" basenames in Zulu, Korean, Japanese
and English. This is completely typical XTM, as shown in the
examples in the XTM spec. I'm not sure why you'd want to do
anything different, such as divide it into four topics. If
we assume that    (08)

   "http://www.altheim.com/zoo/elephant.html";    (09)

is an acceptable indicator of the subject "elephant", then all
three of the divided topics would appropriately contain a
<subjectIdentity> pointing to that URL, and would be merged
back into what you see above the first time it was processed
through a compliant topic map engine. People in four languages
could locate the topic (whose ID is "ele34") by searching in
the scope of either of the four languages provided.    (010)

Murray    (011)

......................................................................
Murray Altheim                         <mailto:m.altheim @ open.ac.uk>
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK    (012)

      In the evening
      The rice leaves in the garden
      Rustle in the autumn wind
      That blows through my reed hut.  -- Minamoto no Tsunenobu    (013)